On September 13th, 2019, Prof. Ji Liang from Tianjin University visited our group at DICP for academic exchanges. During his visit, he gave an impressively academic report entitled “ Multifunctional Carbon Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage ”. Academic reportwere was chaired by Prof. Jian Liu.
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In his report, Prof.Ji Liang emphasized that the key reaction of devices for new energy resources, including metal-air batteries, fuel cells, and so on, is a chemical redox reaction. His team developed a series ofnon-noble-metal electrocatalysts in order to replace the commercial Platinum-based catalysts which are high-cost, unstable, and difficult to recycle. They improved the ability of mass-transfer by thehierarchical porous structure, got the high catalytic active sites by controlling the surface chemical structure, and achieved the highelectronic conductanceby designing the graphene structure.They realizedcatalytic performanceof non-noble-metal materials comparable to Pt-C, or even betterthan Pt-C. They provided the mechanism of the non-noble-metal active sites for oxygen reduction reaction. Furthermore, they extended theconceptionof catalysis on oxygen reduction to other fundamental electrocatalytic processes. As for the conversion of LiSxin lithium-sulfur batteries, they regulatedthe N-doping on the surface of the carbon matrixto significantly improve the dynamic rate of LiSxin the redox reaction and enhance the interaction of LiSxwith the surface of carbon materials. Besides, thecycling stability andrate capabilityofsulfur batteriesareimproved obviously, which points to the new designing direction of electrode materials in lithium-sulfur batteries. At the end of forum, Assistant Professor Wenming Tian, president of the Youth Promotion Association of our institute, presented an award to Prof. Ji Liang.
Prof. Ji Liang obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Adelaide in 2014. Following that, his research was supported by the T. S. Ke Scheme by the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARD). He joined the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Tianjin University in 2019. His current research interest focuses on the multifunctional carbon nanomaterials for energy storage and conversion (e.g.non-noble-metal electrocatalysis, lithium-sulfur batteries, and lithium-ion batteries). By rationally designing materials’ microstructure and surface chemistry, Prof. Liang has developed a series of high-performance materials for these applications. In the meantime, the mechanisms of the interesting reaction/catalysis characteristics of these materials have also been investigated by theoretical simulations. In the last five years, Dr. Ji Liang has published a series of papers in Angew. Chem., Adv. Mater., Adv. Energy. Mater., Adv. Funct. Mater., J. Am. Chem. Soc., Energy Storage Mater. on this topic, as well as a number of book chapters. These publications have been cited for over 7200 times.
